The devils came over the plain at the hour the lamps went up on the wall.
The eldest felt them before anything else did. They came as heat comes off a road at the end of a summer day, low and rippling, and under the heat there was a smell like scorched hair. They were many. She did not try to count them. Counting had been the third's work at the boundary, and she left it to him.
The Seven stood in their ring across the road. It was the formation they had held at the Prison through eleven discharges, each a seventh of the way round from the next. They had taken it up again without a word, the way a hand closes on a familiar tool. The road ran through the middle of the ring. It was not a road anyone had built. It was the path the devils had worn in the long day between the camp on the plain and the dark at the foot of the city wall, where they crossed each night to whisper to the frightened. The eldest had found it by its smell.
The Seven had walked a long way to stand on it.
They had not spoken of why. At the island, around the open chain, each had said what the road had shown it. None had said what to do. The wind off the water had taken half the words. Then they had turned toward this city. That was all. Her kind did not make speeches. A thing was decided when every one of them inclined to it at the same angle, and they had.
The first of the devils reached the ring.
It wore the face of an old man in a white cap. It walked up the road toward her as if it were going home. Behind it came a girl with wet hair, and a soldier with no boots, and a woman holding a bundle that did not move. Under each face the eldest could feel what was there: a small hot knot, quick and spiteful and young. Every one of them was young. To her they were sparks thrown off a fire she had been sitting beside since before their grandfathers were made.
The old man's face reached the line of the ring and stopped as if it had walked into a wall.
The first night they held.
The devils pressed on the ring the way the contained had pressed on the seal from inside, and the eldest knew the feeling exactly. It was a weight leaning, testing, leaning again. The Seven gave nothing. They had sat twenty thousand years around a bell without moving. Holding still was the one thing they had learned better than anything that walked. Faces broke against the formation and fell back. A boy's face. A bride's. A face she thought had once been worn by someone who sold oranges.
Near midnight the sixth's knee went down.
She felt it through the ground. It was the same knee that had gone down at the boundary when the defensive field first struck them, and he had carried that alone, and he carried this alone too. He did not cry out. Her kind had no cry. The ring flexed where he knelt. A devil wearing a fisherman's face came through the gap at a run and went on toward the wall.
Then the sixth came apart.
There was no wound in it. He did not fall the way the human dead fall. He thinned. The edges of him lifted and went off into the cold like ash off a ridge when the wind finds it. The middle of him went after the edges. Where he had been there was ground and nothing on it.
The eldest held her place. Around the ring she felt the others close the distance by a little, each of them shifting a fifth of the way toward the empty station, and the ring was six.
She understood it then, standing in the dark with the devils leaning on her. Something had kept the Seven from ending, all those years. She had always taken it for their nature. It had been the bell, and the waiting for the bell. The bell had rung, and the door had opened, and what had kept them was spent. They could end now. They could end like anything that was made.
None of the others turned toward her. She did not need them to. They had all felt the same thing at the same angle.
The second night the devils came in greater number, and they had learned the ring.
They did not press it evenly now. They went for the stations, one at a time, many on one. The third went first. He had carried the count of the eleven discharges, and he went out the way he had counted, evenly, a little of him at a time, as if he were keeping a tally of his own going. The fourth held her fixed line for a long time after there was nothing left behind it to fix, out of habit. Then she was not there either. The second went without the eldest feeling the moment at all. She reached for him and found the place empty.
The fifth lasted until the sky over the eastern hills began to grey.
When he came apart the ring was two, and two is not a ring. It was the eldest and the first, standing on either side of the devils' road with the faces of the dead going past them in the dark toward the wall. The devils no longer bothered to stop. They poured between the two of them like water between two stones. One wore a child's face she had seen before, on the road out of the Forgotten Village. It went past her toward the wall. It did not look at her either.
On the wall above, the lamps were going out. From somewhere inside the city a voice rose and gave the call to the dawn prayer, and then another voice further in. The devils on the road pulled back from it toward the plain, all at once, like a hand snatched off a stove. For a short while the road was empty.
The first spoke then. In twenty thousand years she had heard him speak once before. That was on the island, and it had been the name of a city. He spoke now in the dissolved tongue, the one their names were in, and what he said was short.
"He never looked at us."
He said it the way one sets down a heavy thing at the end of a road, to be sure it is set down.
The third night there were only two of them to hold anything, and they did not try to hold a ring. They stood in the road side by side, an arm's length apart, as they had never once stood in all the long interval. The devils came at sunset and came at both.
The first went before midnight. She was close enough this time to feel the whole of it. He thinned from the edges inward. At the last there was only a small hard point left of him, cold, the size of a seed. Then the cold went too.
She stood on the devils' road and the devils went round her.
They did not stop to finish her. She understood that as well, and it was worse. There was nothing on her worth the trouble. A key with no door left to fit gets put down somewhere and forgotten.
Toward dawn they went back to the plain. The voices on the wall gave the call again. The grey came up over the eastern hills.
The eldest looked round the place where the ring had been. Seven stations, each a seventh of the way round from the next. She could still feel exactly where each one was, the way a tongue still feels the gap where a tooth has gone. All of them were empty ground. The wind off the plain moved the dust across them, and the dust lay down again.
Nothing else standing on that road had ever heard the bell.